Illumin8ing an Old but Useful Feature: Batch Pay Your Way to Freedom

Do you love Xero & Receipt Bank? Like a meat pie and tomato sauce? If so, I bet you didn’t think things could get even better. Not to use an old cliché, but wait, there’s more!

If you’ve already got all your suppliers’ bills in Xero with Receipt Bank (or entered manually if you don’t have Receipt Bank), you’d normally login to online banking and start paying them one by one. But doesn’t that take longer than it should? You can buy a trampoline on eBay with two clicks, why shouldn’t you be able to pay for all your widgets, contractors, and accounting fees in one fell swoop?

With Batch Payments, you can take your back-end business processes speed up a whole other notch. Simply put, what you’re about to do is mass pay bills just by ticking them off. This isn’t a new feature, but for how useful it is, it’s one of the most underused out there!

To get batch payments going, you’ll need to:

- Make sure the bank account information is set up in Xero correctly.

* You may also need to contact your bank and ask if they require a Direct Entry User ID so they can identify the file.

- Have your suppliers bank account information in Xero (this will be the time investment required to make things more efficient going forward).

Then to process a batch payment:

- Go to Accounts > Purchases > Awaiting Payment;

- Tick the boxes on the left that you want to pay;

- Click Batch Payment at the top of the awaiting payment list;

- Choose the payment date and your payment account;

- Export the ABA file and upload to your online banking.

If you normally pay 5 bills at a time, now you’ll only have to pay one, and even that one won’t involve any data entry. When it comes time to reconcile, you only have to match the batch payment. The reconciling process will be even faster too!

If you have employees that aren’t on recurring payments, you can also pay them with batch payments! Get the employee’s bank details in Xero, process a pay run, export the ABA file and upload it to your bank. That’s it, you’re all done!

Now go do whatever you want with the rest of your night. You’ve finished your accounting!